A couple of years ago I made a blog post about Creating a Media Kit for Your Blog. This has become one of my best-performing blog posts to date, being repinned thousands of times a week, even to this day.
Since that time I have been working within a digital agency, heading influencer campaigns and seeing what is expected of bloggers and online content creators from the perspective of brands. Doing so has shown me that I absolutely HATE my previous media kit! Yes, it includes all of the necessary information, but the approach is all wrong.

Working with some of Dubai’s biggest influencers and even international celebrities like Lindsay Lohan, while representing big name brands – I’d like to believe that I’ve learned a thing or two.

Being on the receiving end of media kits has changed my perspective on the traditional template of media kits starting with:

It Doesn’t Have to Be a Single Page

While it is much preferred that you keep it succinct and to the point, it is far more important that those who are receiving your media kit get all the information necessary. One of the top UAE style bloggers that I’ve worked with actually closed the deal with my client by sending me a 7-page pdf. Though that may seem long, and opposes all of the media kit rules you’ll find outlined on Pinterest, she gave me all of the information I needed, left me with no questions and even included footnotes for obscure statistics. For example, her overall social media audience was quite large but her Youtube views were quite low. She included notes stating that she’d just launched the channel, would soon be launching on a multi-channel network and even included the projected views for once she launched with them.

Which leads me to….

2. Don’t let Your Numbers Hold You Back

As a brand representative, one of the MOST annoying misconceptions surrounding content creators is that influence is measured in followers. This myth is believed by both creators and brands alike. I’ve been approached by an “influencer” for a perfume brand deal, with over 100K followers on Instagram alone. Sounds amazing enough, but when I researched her engagement rate*, I found that it was far too low to actually have any impact on our campaign.

On the flip side, I’ve had brands ask for a creator with at least 10K subscribers, but the person they were interested had no audience in our region. So don’t feel intimidated if you have a very small audience. Work with what you have. Put your focus on pleasing your small community and increasing your engagement with them (reply to comments, build an email list, make them feel like individuals not just one person in a crowd) and you can actually end up more useful to a brand’s campaign than the blogger with a giant viewership.

My rule is, influence isn’t about views. Influence is about moving those viewers to action.

3. Don’t Telemarket Your Media Kit

In my previous blog post I said that having a media kit is a great way to network at conferences (you know, in addition to traditional business cards), reaching out to PR companies if you’d like to join their mailing lists and attend more events or collaborate with their brands. It’s also great for reaching out to larger bloggers who you’d like to write for. Overall media kits are a quick summary of why someone should collaborate with you.

That is essentially what a media kit is for, but I was very wrong in the way that I describing going about using it.
A new frustration that I’ve found in receiving media kits and random emails requesting favours and brand collaborations from content creators – has been that they are complete strangers! Imagine receiving an email from someone you’ve never met saying ‘hey! Can I have $500 bucks? Pretty please! Here are all of the reasons you should give me $500 bucks and all of the people who have done it for me in the past, thanks!”

Sending out cold emails to PR reps and brands can come across as big asks from complete strangers. Build a rapport with them. You can do this by following them on social media, interacting with their updates, congratulating them on new business and eventually (do this for a few weeks) private message them asking if you can have their contact information. Even after you receive their personal info it’s still a bit early to straight out ask for a collaboration. At this stage, it is far more appropriate to ask to join their PR mailing list for updates, and then, later pitch an idea that is customized to their client or brand.

Your media kit is an incredible tool to seal the deal, but you should flirt with the contact person a bit, go on a few dates first, before trying for third base.

Check out my updated Media Kit

While I used Canva for my previous one, I created my new media kit on adobe spark. Both are great, easy to use and free online graphic builders. The one downside is that I currently cannot export my adobe spark page into a pdf, so I instead embed or share links directly to the page.

If you want further tips on what exactly to include in your media kit, check out my previous blog post Creating a Media Kit for Your Blog. Even though I hate the media kit that I included in this post (haha) the information to include is still very relevant.

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Dominique

I'm Dominique! Content Marketer, New Wife, Old School R&B. I geek out over productivity books and camera equipment. I'm also a huge fan of Pinterest, shots that taste like candy, and daily youtube vloggers.